How-to Change Normal Direction | Point Normals in Blender 3.x

In this short Blender tutorial, we'll take a look at how to rotate face normals to point towards a certain direction using an empty.

[NOTICE]
An updated note for those looking at this tutorial for use with cross-plane vegetation. I originally made this tutorial with development for the flight sims MSFS, FSX, & P3D. However, with much more experimenting in the months after making this tutorial, I have concluded that using Model Converter X is still the best method for applying flat shading to cross-plane style vegetation (Tutorial linked below).

The demonstrated method in this tutorial will point all the normals towards a fixed point, regardless of their position relative to that point. This means that normals further away from the empty will start to point inward the farther out they are. This is not ideal for flat-shaded vegetation. The normals should always point directly up for proper shading.

It's on my eventual to-do list to redo this video to add better context, but for the time being, I'm leaving it up as it's still a good reference for pointing all normals in a certain direction.

[ALTERNATE METHOD]
An alternate method using Model Converter X to edit cross-plane vegetation for FSX, P3D, & MSFS has also been demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hVG7VQpZPE

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Tags
#msfs2020 #blender #tutorial

Recorded with Streamlabs OBS. Edited in Adobe Premiere CC.

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